Virginia’s Embattled Textbooks: Lessons (Learned and Not) from the Centennial Era

After Lesley Gordon invited my reflection upon an inflammatory assertion in my daughter’s fourth-grade textbook—the claim that thousands of African Americans had served in the Confederate army, including two battalions under the command of Stonewall Jackson—I began researching older textbooks in the hope of discovering when and how this contested claim first found its way into Virginia’s classrooms. My daughter’s textbook, I soon discovered, had not perpetuated an older myth, but had introduced a new one.¹ I also learned that Virginia had a long history of its textbooks coming under fire for their coverage of the Civil War. For the first seventy-five years after the Confederacy’s surrender, such controversies focused on the books’ alleged northern bias.² But as Virginia commemorated the Civil War’s centennial, coinciding as it did with the Civil Rights Movement, a public protest emerged over the state’s unabashedly pro-Confederate textbooks. Those textbooks, written during the 1950s, largely reflected the conservative outlook of the state’s anti-integration Democratic political machine. Ironically, it was the successful backlash against those books that helped foster a flawed review process that allowed the unsubstantiated claim about Stonewall Jackson to find its way into my daughter’s textbook. Together, the two controversies—separated by half a century—bring into sharper relief where children’s textbooks often go wrong: When they use history to teach civics, they risk distorting the past. Even good intentions can lead to bad history.

“A Little Something Extra”

When my daughter brought home her brand-new Virginia Studies textbook in late September 2010, I flipped to the Civil War chapter with mixed expectations. Etched in my memory was a school-issued coloring book that a colleague’s daughter had brought home a decade earlier; it asked children to color the gray uniform of the “patriotic” Robert E. Lee. At the same time, however, recent events gave me hope that Virginia was confronting its past more forthrightly. Three days earlier, I had attended a conference at Norfolk State University, a historically black university, on the theme of “Race, Slavery, and the Civil War: The Tough Stuff of American History and Memory.” Sponsored by the Virginia Sesquicentennial of the American Civil War Commission—a creation of the Virginia General Assembly—the conference featured eminent scholars who spoke frankly about issues of race and public memory. Opening remarks were offered by Governor Bob McDonnell, who the previous spring had declared April “Confederate History Month,” defending his proclamation at the time by denying that slavery was central to the war; he now offered a plainspoken apology and promised that “a modern Virginia will remember that past with candor, courage and conciliation.”³ Among the day’s most riveting presentations was Bruce Levine’s ten-minute synopsis of his scholarship on the “Myth of the Black Confederate,” the notion that large numbers of African Americans bore arms for the Confederacy. As I listened to him debunk what he called a “widely accepted” myth, I wondered just how widespread it was.⁴

I found out sooner than I expected. That conference took place on a Friday; on Monday, my daughter came home with Our Virginia: Past and Present.⁵ One of three Virginia Studies textbooks listed as “approved” for the fourth grade by the Virginia Board of Education, the volume was advertised by its publisher as “correlating” with Virginia’s History and Social Studies Standards of Learning Curriculum, commonly called the SOL. The Virginia Studies SOL is designed to teach “skills for historical and geographical analysis and responsible citizenship.”⁶ In its introduction, Our Virginia informs children that they will “meet Virginia’s greatest men and women and see how all their hard work and sacrifice shaped our state, our nation, and our world.”⁷ On the book’s cover are illustrations of an unidentified Native American, Thomas Jefferson, two soldiers from the U.S. Colored Troops, and George Washington’s Mount Vernon. Among the eight individuals portrayed on the title page, one is Native American and...